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This is a spoiler-free review of The White Lotus, Season 3… even if you don’t watch the show, there are a few things that I am going to talk about that might be of interest.
I love The White Lotus. The creator and director, Mike White, does such a good job of skewering the rich while also being honest about how there’s a part of all of us that would like to be wealthy. He also is brilliant at creating characters that we all recognize—even the richest asshole in the show acts like somebody you’ve met before. It’s uncanny.
I just finished up Season 3, which had its finale on Sunday night. I love the series, but thought this was the weakest season. I loved Season 1 the most because it came out of nowhere and barreled us all over during the pandemic. I think Season 2 might actually be a little better, but I knew what I was in for. And I liked Season 3 a lot; I just thought it was a notch below the other seasons.
The biggest issue I have with Season 3 is that it was trapped in story purgatory. Like so many shows these days, it should have been either half as long or twice as long. What I mean by that is that there were multiple storylines introduced that should have either not been introduced or expanded dramatically because they end up feeling like Mike White gave them short shrift. This season was eight episodes, but it felt like it should have either been six episodes or 15. The season finale was 90 minutes long and yet felt like 5 important scenes were deleted. Nevertheless, I hung on every minute of the show. You can tell a show has hooked you when you have to watch it live every week, rather than three days later.
I’m writing about the show on my sobriety newsletter because there is usually some addiction stuff in the show (that was certainly the case in Season 3, including a nasty relapse). But the thing that I always connect with is how much Mike White likes to delve into the collision between peoples’ morals and their desire for money and prestige. The White Lotus tends to portray the world as if you have to sell your soul in order to be rich, and the show also consistently indicates that that wealthy lifestyle is an addiction itself.
I get it. I’ve flown on an airplane about 200 times in my life, and I have only ever been in first class once. And yet within five minutes of sitting down in those sweet seats up front, I found myself saying, “Get these peasants to the back of the airplane where they belong. And please keep them out of our special bathroom—I don’t want to be around those grotesque animals!” I realized right away that I am not quite spiritually fit enough to be a rich person yet.
I guess my takeaway on this show—and shows like it—is that lifestyle can be a destructive addiction too. Most of the rich people I’ve encountered in life seem to be people who might struggle if they had to go cold turkey on the 1 percent lifestyle. I would throw in one caveat—of the sober rich people I’ve met, I would say that most of them live admirable, service-driven lives. I like to think I would be one of those types of wealthy people… but perhaps I’d still need to sit in the middle seat of the last row of an airplane once-in-a-while to remain grounded!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Then there was the drunk guy who arrived for an intake session with the rehab psychiatrist—constantly snapping his fingers.
The doctor politely inquired, “Why are you doing that?”
“To keep the tigers away!”
“But there aren’t any tigers here.”
“See,” the man said, “it works.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2000, Anonymous)
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